European demographics have been the theme over the past week and general interest in it has always been driven by projections of Europe’s collapsing birthrate and the often cited Muslim baby-boom. And while some have poured cold water on these notions before, they have remained fairly persistent absence any numbers to debunk them. Yet, evidence from the Dutch Central Bureau for Statistics (CBS) does indeed appear to support the claim that the birthrates of second-generation immigrants adjust towards that of the native population:

Non-western immigrant women are getting less babies. The number of children produced by the second generation of immigrants is almost equal to that of native Dutch women.

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Especially the number of births given by Moroccan women has decreased sharply over the past decade. The first generation Moroccan women who were born between 1945 and 1949 got an average of 5.4 children. For women of the first generation who were born twenty years later that number has been halved.

The age at which the second generation of immigrant women becomes a mother has also moved closer to that of the native inhabitants. For them the average age in 2004 was 30 years, Antillian and Aruban women are even somewhat older when they get their first child.

Furthermore, immigrant women are increasingly childless, report the researchers. Turkish, Moroccan, Surinam and Antillian women are more often without children at age 35 than local women.

This is not an insignificant finding and does indeed put the “Sharia 2050” theory, always more of an argumentative estimate, into question. It also underlines that immigrants do integrate as their reproductive behaviour can not be seen in isolation from their social and economic circumstances.

It doesn’t mean we can abandon some of our deeper concerns over Europe and its future, they stand, but we do have to better understand the numbers that underlie these alarmist assumptions.